Genteel Zen Buddhistsdwelling in eternal Nowmake dull poetry

Like this:

Take an harp, go about the city,
thou harlot that hast been forgotten;
make sweet melody, sing many songs,
that thou mayest be remembered.

Isaiah 23:16 (KJV)

Morrison, Hendrix and Janis the J.
(with others lost tripping along the way)
continue to enlighten young stoners,
adolescent existential loners
who hold them as holy and dig their writ
in billows of bong-smoke. Listen to it:Hendrix and Joplin and Morrison, man were part of some cosmic, like, master-plan
true prophets—thus sayeth The Lizard King.
High as kites, their disciples hear them sing
suburban anthems to teen perdition
sirens of drug-addled sixties vision.
pockets continue to empty for discs
while taking somewhat calculated risks.
Should vomitous overdose be esteemed
with visions that actual prophets dreamed?
These anointed cherubs of sad excess
can never illuminate, much less bless
a nation of youth who have lost their way
and can’t even choose which download to play.Morrison, man—that dude was so profound
he broke on through to that state where I’m bound…Moon-struck drummers, now ghosts of dubious name
live on, in pounding out their spectral fame;
exploding dirigibles flown too high
and blown to pieces in Lucifer’s sky.
Such riffs and licks and solos and visions
should force us to some unkind decisions
wherein we ask how free we really are
when enslaved to a devil’s fallen star.

Cryptography prior to the modern age
was effectively synonymous with encryption, the conversion of information from a readable state
to apparent nonsense.

Wikipedia: Cryptography

I strive in vain to uncover meaning
though such dry fields are barely worth gleaning;
pompous hackademics of brave new verse
have shown, through their scrawling, it can get worse;
wordsmiths of dullness for grad students’ gain,
grant scholars trading in pleasure for pain
with each odd word choice or wretched refrain.

Berryman, Bishop, Lowell, Sexton and Plath
prepare me for rest in their tepid bath
as I try to read them—but fall asleep
the book upon my breast, my boredom deep.
A soporific tried and true, such dreck.
(Amazing they could even cash a check.)

Did madness excuse them to make a fuss,
force meaningful discourse to languish thus
in obfuscation and cryptography
submerged in rarefied verbosity?
What frumpy muse, nose in her thesaurus
hoped to, this scholarly way, implore us
while putting on airs un-deliriously
to study such silly screeds seriously?

Berryman, Bishop, Plath, Sexton, and Lowelllured me with poetry into their hole.
Lord, how these clowns made a good thing boring;
they should have set earthbound souls to soaring.
but turned it into a master’s thesis,
fracturing verse to erudite pieces.

Berryman, overrated mass of sheer
vocabulary overload, unclear,
seems more to justify modernist doubt
than to show what real poetry’s about.

Bishop, cryptic identity-monger
(America’s Vassar-girl no longer)
wrote vaguely accessible verse, sometimes…
and some of her poetry even rhymes!

Plath, prima donna, boring semantics
failing to compensate for her antics
blathering bitterness, head in oven
might have been happier joining a coven.

Sexton, pill-headed prophetess unchained
half poetess of half-sense, half-brained
departed with zest, from her own garage.
(We’re still decoding her cryptic barrage).

Lowell, left quaking in his unstoned grave
more interesting—but still a verbose knave…

These self-absorbed nerds, when not at their shrink
checked out in adultery, pills and drink.
Such sad celebrants of depraved excess,
no vanguard at all, are more a regress
to endless jaded pointlessness and dope,
their abstract verbiage void of all hope.

Who canonized these unexploded shells,
these duds, these fizzling scribes of milquetoast hells…
must we hail and applaud such labored lines?
Instead, make them pay some posthumous fines!
They withered awhile, these funereal blooms;
let REAL poets turn over in their tombs;
call spades on what my ringing spade exhumes.

Cream of lyric America. I yawn.
It’s late now. White moonlight exalts the lawn.
The world sleeps on, lulled to death by dull verse
May their ghosts, fully exorcised, disperse…

My ditty is based on this lyrical sedative.
(I had a heck of a time trying to swallow it):